The Lost Gospel and Its Contents eBook

Now, it may be alleged that these instances of the
slowness of belief on the part of our Lord’s
immediate followers, and the conduct of the multitudes
who expressed such wonder at His miracles, are contrary
to one another, but, they are not; for the astonishment
of the multitudes did not arise from credulity in
the least, but was the expression of that state of
mind which must exist (no matter how carefully it is
concealed), when some unlooked-for occurrence, totally
inexplicable on any natural principles, presents itself.
I cite it to show how utterly unfamiliar that age
was with even the pretence of the exhibition of miraculous
powers. If there be any substratum of truth whatsoever
in the accounts of the slowness of belief on the part
of the Apostles, it is a proof that our Lord’s
most familiar friends were anything but the superstitious
persons which certain writers assume them to have been.

SECTION XXIII.

DEMONIACAL POSSESSION.

The question of Demoniacal Possession now demands
a passing notice.

The author of “Supernatural Religion”
ascribes all such phenomena to imposture or delusion;
and, inasmuch as these supposed miracles of casting
out of evil spirits are associated with other miracles
of Christ in the same narrative, he uses the odium
with which this class of miracles is in this day regarded,
for the purpose of discrediting the miracles of healing
and the Resurrection of Jesus.

I cannot help expressing my surprise at the difficulty
which some writers, who desire fully and faithfully
to uphold the supernatural, seem to have respecting
Demoniacal Possession. The difficulty seems to
me to be not in the action of evil spirits in this
or in that way, but in their existence. And yet
the whole analogy of nature, and the state of man
in this world, would lead us to believe, not only in
the objective existence of a world of spirits, but
in the separation of their characters into good and
evil.

Those who deny the fact of an actually existing spiritual
world of angels, if they are Atheists, must believe
that man is the highest rational existence in the
universe; but this is absurd, for the intellect of
man in plainly very circumscribed, and he is slowly
discovering laws which account for the phenomena which
he sees, which laws were operative for ages before
he discovered them, and imply infinitely more intellect
in their invention, so to speak, and imposition and
nice adjustment with one another, than he shows in
their mere discovery. A student, for instance,
has a problem put before him, say upon the adjustments
of the forces of the heavenly bodies. The solution,
if it evinces intelligence in him, must evince more
and older intelligence in the man who sets him the
problem; but if the conditions of the problem truly
represent the acts of certain forces and their compensations,
can we possibly deny that there is an intellect infinitely